Rabbi Lionel Blue obituary: Britain's first openly gay rabbi who was loved by listeners and abhorred by Jewish traditionalists in equal measure

Out of his personal experiences, his honest and decent lifestyle reached out to the dispossessed and the lonely, those crippled by life and persecuted by society (Rex)

Laughter entered religious life in Britain when Lionel Blue appeared upon the scene. Much of it was intentional on the part of this deeply spiritual rabbi who never forgot that his roots were in London’s East End and that his ancestors had lived in the shtetl of Eastern Europe. The millions of listeners who heard him regularly on the BBC came to know his mother, aunt, and dog as well as Lionel Blue. He always praised his mother’s honesty and her hatred of pretentiousness. Sharing her honesty, Blue always shared all aspects of himself with the public: his illness, diabetes, epilepsy, together with the personal challenges of his sexuality and his problems with organised religion. Everything was always tied up with a joke, with a reflection upon the divine comedy of human life. And so he was claimed as a personal possession by the millions who felt that they truly “owned” him.

In truth, they know very little of the complex religious figure who represented Judaism to a vast public. In some ways, one must blame the BBC, which saw him as the great storyteller of radio. There was an insistence that he had to end each broadcast with a funny story and, ultimately, people waited so much for the punchline that they failed to see the deep spiritual wisdom and the extraordinary intelligence which had been forced into a clown’s costume. Blue was a profound scholar of Judaism and of the spirituality within the other religions which surround him and which he appreciated so deeply. Many Jewish traditionalists abhorred him because he was the permanent challenge to dogmatic certainty within religious life. When this rabbi wrote about his religious experiences within his visits into Christianity, Jews tended to be uncomfortable and Christians were annoyed that he didn’t stay within his own boundaries. Yet out of his personal experiences, his honest and decent lifestyle reached out to the dispossessed and the lonely, those crippled by life and persecuted by society. Most of his work latterly was in the field of charitable organisations far beyond the boundaries of his religious tradition. The fact that he could disappear into a monastery and emerge as a stronger, better Jew was inexplicable to the narrow minded who insist that boundaries may not be breached; but Blue always walked in the grey, uncharted areas between the battle lines.

It didn’t start that way. Born in 1939 to Harry and Netty Blue, Lionel seemed bound to fulfil all the dreams of the immigrant Jews in the East End. An MA from Balliol in history, a Semetics BA from University College in London, ordination as rabbi from the newly formed Leo Baeck College, and the road to leadership within the Progressive Jewish community in Britain seemed assured. He rejected it. In one of his finest TV productions, In Search of Holy England, Blue was portrayed as strolling across the Oxford quadrangles expressing his doubts and fears concerning the religious enterprise to Bishop Richard Harries and other friends. Becoming a rabbi seemed almost an act of defiance. After serving the Settlement Synagogue and a quite different suburban congregation in Middlesex, he became more a minstrel of religion, serving the World Union for Progressive Judaism by visiting the tiny re-emerging Jewish community of post-Auschwitz Europe. He saw himself as standing upon a high pulpit, looking upon a destroyed, poisoned land. He looked at the Valley of Dry Bones, and asked the prophet Ezekiel’s question: “Can those bones live?“ More than many others, he brought new life to those places. Yet he had to reach beyond them.

We often met in Germany, and asked ourselves: “What are we doing here?” Lionel knew the answer: “I am reconciling Germany’s children with their parents who have sinned.” Again, this attitude did not sit well with the Jewish establishment. Yet throughout Europe, in Paris, Amsterdam, Prague and Berlin, Lionel became known and loved. He founded the Standing Conference of Jews, Christians and Muslims in Europe (JCM), and involved many of his friends, particularly Jonathan Magonet, in that work. Later, Magonet became his partner in the writing of new liturgies for the Reform movement (RSGB), and many of his later books were written jointly with his friends. In that process. Lionel acquired many new friends, who waited for his new book as eagerly as they tuned in on Monday mornings to listen to his thoughts for the day. In one Listeners’ Poll for the “Radio Personality of the Year” he gained third place (behind Maggie Thatcher and Terry Wogan).

Blue had become the storyteller of the nation. Among more than a dozen books we should mention To Heaven with Scribes and Pharisees (1975); A Backdoor to Heaven (1978); Kitchen Blues and Bright Blue (1985); and A Guide to Heaven and Hereafter (1988), written with Magonet. Their joint endeavours continued with The Guide to Here and Hereafter (1989), How to Get Up When Life Lets You Down (1992) and more recent works, most of them translated into German. He even delved into the realm of cookery books and became a columnist for the Catholic Universe, presenting “interfaith menus”. National newspapers and the religious press (The Tablet, The Church Times and, of course, many Jewish publications) all carried his columns and thoughts. He was one of the founders of the periodical European Judaism, established in 1966 and still representative of Lionel’s questing, challenging style.

Blue did not abandon the “establishment”. For many years, he was the head of the Reform Rabbinical Court, displaying both his rabbinical knowledge and his compassion. Throughout these years, he taught at the Leo Baeck College, instructing rabbinical students in liturgy and in spirituality. He, too, like his late colleague and friend Hugo Gryn, could be called “a rabbi’s rabbi”. Many called upon him for counsel and were comforted. Yet it was the disenfranchised, the outsiders and the persecuted who came to him daily. He always found time for them, as well as for his painting, his quest for simple people on the “Costa Geriatrica” he visited on package holidays. But then, there were times when he was the sailor reaching out for the lonely sea and the sky (perhaps with a bottle of genever stowed in the sail locker), sailing alone or with a friend across the channel. Then, he was the writer who needed solitude for writing but knew that there were friends waiting for him at the next landfall. Once, when I visited him, he instructed me to continue my theology book. He was also planning a new book. Looking up at the sky, he murmured: “I think it will be a detective story.”

Albert H Friedlander died in 2004